4312 add EDA4000 Expansion Chassis / RAID Expansion

A volume is basically a virtual disk.  Users don't see volumes, what they see is a list of network shares.  That means that the volume structure is immaterial to them.

So the process here is 

• switch to flexraid
• create a second volume on the EDA4000
• create some shares on that volume.  These can be new shares, or you can move some shares to the EDA4000 from the existing volume on the 4312

To move shares from the RN4312 you

• create a share on the EDA4000 with a temporary name
• set up an rsync backup job on the NAS to copy an existing share ot the new one
• delete the original share
• rename the EDA4000 share to the match the name of the original share.

Note you can't move the "home" shares for your users - they have to stay on the original volume.

Hi dallis11 

You are correct that data cannot exist coherently on two different volumes. It also means that the two different volumes would be separate entities, holding separate data. I understand your desire to expand the raid as that is obviously the easiest answer. You keep one volume and it just gets bigger. Easy management.

In theory you can expand the volume across to an EDA with Flex-RAID (or at least you used to be able to). However, this is just a very bad idea altogether. Problems with having one raid volume across main NAS and EDA is single point of failure. Your EDA is connected via eSATA or similar and if that connection went bad or the EDA went bad, your entire volume will go down with it. Secondly, performance would be poor because instead of each disk having their own SATA connection to the main board, now all disks in the EDA must share the connection over the main chassis... and since all disks in the entire raid are depended on each other, performance across the board will suffer. It is just not recommended in any scenario.

Making a separate volume in the EDA is the way to go. Yes, you have to manage two volumes but that is how it is. One volume could be your archive data for example. You problem is understandable and a big issue in IT today. The need to (endlessly) expand but not have multiple volumes. It is a very hard problem to solve and also why the real big guys in storage (EMC, NetApp, etc.) charge insane money. Their solutions are super scalable but unless you are very big company the cost will be a massive hit. On the ReadyNAS (and other similar products) there is not much you can do but restructure the data layout and simply deal with multiple volumes and data separation.

I hope that makes sense.

Cheers